BinaryFormatter alternatives

Question

A BinaryFormatter-serialized array of 128³ doubles, takes up 50 MB of space. Serializing an array of 128³ structs with two double fields takes up 150 MB an

Answer 1

If you use a BinaryWriter instead of a Serializer you will get the desired (mimimal) size.
I'm not sure about the speed, but give it a try.

On my system writing 32MB takes less than 0.5 seconds, including Open and Close of the stream.

You will have to write your own for loops to write the data, like this:

struct Pair
{
    public double X, Y;
}

static void WritePairs(string filename, Pair[] data)
{
    using (var fs = System.IO.File.Create(filename))
    using (var bw = new System.IO.BinaryWriter(fs))
    {
        for (int i = 0; i < data.Length; i++)
        {
            bw.Write(data[i].X);
            bw.Write(data[i].Y);
        }
    }
}

static void ReadPairs(string fileName, Pair[] data)
{
    using (var fs = System.IO.File.OpenRead(fileName))
    using (var br = new System.IO.BinaryReader(fs))
    {
        for (int i = 0; i < data.Length; i++)
        {
            data[i].X = br.ReadDouble();
            data[i].Y = br.ReadDouble();
        }
    }
}